I've been hearing about this SOPA thing, and wanted to throw in my two cents. I started by trying to read the bill itself, but cannot pull myself through the legal jargon. So I decided to do what any former college student would do, and looked up Wikipdia articles, and other such things to educate myself. After all that I have read, I cannot say that I support the bill, but I can see where corporations and legislators might.

The bill seems to have a few definitions, depending on who you ask or when, so I am basing this of what I read most recently. I had some thoughts on what I was reading, why there might be support for it, and why it isn't the end of the world.

1. Stopping Online Piracy is Good


This kind of piracy is totally OK though. Just sayin'.

This bill is being introduced in DC. It should come as no surprise, then, that this is grounded in politics. From the point of view of stakeholders, stockholders, and politicians, the intent of this bill is right up there with the motion that puppies are adorable. But if you do not support the bill, someone is going to use the contrapositive argument: If you are against this bill, you are against stopping piracy. So now imagine you are the CEO of a company. Do you side with the people providing you capital and support on Wall Street, or do you side with the end consumer? In my opinion, both moves have their merit. Taking a public stand for or against SOPA is a ballsy move that will upset one of these crowds, but there is one larger problem in the form of the ESA. These companies belong to this Association, which provides them benefits like E3, stats and figures, and are (from what I can tell) a liaison between the game company and the government. By standing against them, you may be risking those benefits, which will no doubt have a negative impact on your business. If the bill actually does stop piracy, there may be increased revenue (which is difficult to qualify, as it is somewhere between 0 and several million dollars...they won't lose money if the bill stops piracy is what I am driving at here.)

2. The Red Tape

Paraphrasing what I read while researching, the bill allows the copyright holders of an intellectual property or the Department of Justice to go to court to see if they can remove the offending material from the website. Just typing that sentence was work. Because of the time and money this is going to require trivial infringements will be impractical to go after. In addition, there is a threshold of times the site has to offend in order to be brought to court, so this will only target large case copyright infringement. Finally, the result of this is that the website has to remove the infringing material within a reasonable time frame, and until then only that material will be blocked from search engines and other sites. How often do you want to bet the site will voluntarily resolve the conflict out of court? My guess is the very high ninety percent range.

3. Free advertising



One of the largest complaints is that companies (Read: EA/Activision) can stop user generated content, such as streams of their games and YouTube. My question to that is why would they want to? If you can get a large audience, for free, to watch someone play and enjoy your game, that is called advertising. That will lead to people buying your games(/music/watching your sitcom whatever) which leads to money. There is no reason why a company would go through the hassle of courts to take away a free revenue stream. In addition, sicking the dogs on someone who is posting user generated content will create a PR nightmare which could stop future revenue streams, which again is BAD.

4. The Internet Isn't Free

But dammit, Taterchimp, the internet is a bastion of freedom and hope! It doesn't belong to the government, and we aren't commie dogs like China! Oh wait, we are, never mind. I don't know where this idea that the internet has no right to be regulated comes from. Case in point: upload some child pornography, and see how free the internet is then. Or you know, look at it, and tell me you don't think you are going to get a phone call. The internet has to have certain regulations on it (and if you don't think so, you are a pedophile....see point #1 )

5. Censorship is already happening

So wait, companies are going to have the ability to remove content from a website if they have a copyright to that material? Then the corporations have power (don't get me started on why corporations are sooooo evil lolololidk my bff Jill). This has been happening for years on YouTube, specifically with Viacom, and generally with the entire music industry. All of them have the ability to remove user generated content from the site (often creating the worst audio/video match ever). But this is different, because LOGIC! Yet I haven't seen this trend with video game streams or let's play videos. Maybe video game companies don't care enough to pursue it, so it wouldn't be an issue if the bill passed anyway....


Better judgement said: don't Google image search pedophilia.

6. The Bill Could Assassinate the President

Almost every article I have read has mentioned things that SOPA could do, and very few mention what it will do. SOPA could disable the next YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, it could prevent people from streaming, it could slap my mother and piss on my great grandfather's grave. Many of these claims come off as fairly baseless. I can't say that these won't happen, but you can't tell me that they absolutely will, so until it is set in stone that this bill is going to take away your first born, let's take a stop back, alright?

7. Pirates Will Find Another Way

Oh they will? The fuck it, let's not even waste our time trying to stop them. Expanding that to the nth degree, we shouldn't stop murderers, rapists, and dictators, because they will just keep doing it anyway. What I am trying to say is that because they may (read: will) find another way, that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop what they are doing now.


Again, I am not sure that this bill is the best course of action. I honestly do not have the background and the patience to understand every single implications that this bill has. That being said, I can see it having some merit, and I get the feeling it has been a tad bit sensationalized. If any of my facts are incorrect, I did not do so intentionally, and I am genuinely interested in why I was wrong (with supporting evidence pleeeease). At the end of the day, I cannot see myself boycotting a company if they do support this bill, and on the other side of the coin, a company that stands against it hasn't really won me over.

Before I get into it, this is where I am coming from: I have a background in businessy things,and every once in a while, people post business things, either as a story, in the comments. Most of the time, these are harmless enough, but every once in a while, it is just flat out wrong. When people say that games should be sold at half price, that companies should take a major hit in sales to improve PR, it kind of sets me off. I mean no disrespect by this, but most of the people on Destructoid are not my most trusted resources when it comes to business practices, and maybe the companies who operate as a business actually know what they are doing. I will admit I am not to be the most trusted resource either, but I wanted to give my two cents, and today I want to focus on used games. My recommendation for listening for this post: Sympathy for the Devil of course.

Argument number one: games are too expensive, so of course people will trade them in! Sixty dollars is pretty steep for a game, and when multiple games come out, that is a hassle right? I remember back in the day when Super Mario RPG cost...wait, sixty dollars still? All SNES games cost me sisxy back then, and NES games started at fifty as well. I don't want to seem all crotchedy and remembering the 'good ol days' back when you could get coffee for a nickel, but inflation is clearly working in our favor here. Today's money is worth less, and the price stayed the same, so a game should be cheaper now than it was before. Actually, there are places online where you can view/apply the cpi to get an approximate value (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt has the full tables). Long story short, Super Mario RPG would now 'cost' around 42 dollars. Please keep in mind too that today's game cost to develop is probably higher right now, and compared to NES games, you are getting a crazy amount of content.


I seriously googled inflation, and this was the first thing that came up. Awesome.

Argument number two: people leverage used games to buy new games, and support the market. For who? I know that people will say that a used game sale is not a lost sale, and the same argument goes for piracy. In the eyes of the business who produces the games it is at very least a potential sale. So let's say you trade in three games to buy a new game, and for the sake of simplicity, all 3 games were made by the same publisher. They just lost 3 games worth of potential revenue, and gained one games worth. Not such a good deal. Without revenue, developers will close, without developers, we don't get games. I recall many posts saying this kind of thinking is 'short sighted', and I tend to agree....

A lot of people bring up argument 2.5: Other industries deal with used sales all the time, but they don't seem to suffer because of it. Which industry? Lets start high: car industry. That's a big one, and you don't hear complaints, right? That's because a car will automatically devalue itself until someone who had the car has to buy another one. Natural degradation of the product leads to another purchase, and it doesn't matter who the end user of that product was (insert easy Xbox joke from 2006\7 here). I should suggest that companies start doing that! Oh wait, Capcom has tried and there was crazy backlash (Resident Evil 3d, and Pac Man/Galaga). Maybe it isn't the right way to go, but the logic they are applying is easy to understand, and from a business perspective, I sympathize with them (even though it is a dick move, even though I buy new). While then, video games aren't cars, they are more like movies or music. iTunes has such insane DRM and other restrictions that it makes what gamers put up with look like a joke. Hey, you just bought a song! A SONG! And it won't play on anything that doesn't have m4a support, and it is locked to your account which you can only have on five computers and you have to sync it to your registered iProduct and fuck this, I buy mp3s free of DRM from amazon! Think what Microsoft does with timed exclusives is bad? Movie to DVD transitions typically take four months (source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6497.ars) and depending on the box office success can take even longer. Can you imagine if there was literally [b]no way[b] for you to play a used video game for half a year until after it was released? So we gamers, we have it easy.


I really, really hate Apple, so it makes me happy to see that 'drm' on google returns Apple hate. Or you know, I would feel that way if I were petty (which I'm not...honest).

Argument 3: The sequel sells better because of the original. How many games do you think get a sequel? The game industry is crazy cut throat today. What we have seen, is that if your title isn't a hit, You (Kaos) Lose(Visceral) Your (Pandemic) Job (Codemasters). The fact is that if a majority of a studios sales come from used games, I argue they are more likely to close down than they are to make a sequel (and Kaos isn't taking Homefront 2, so another company gets to celebrate the boon from used games. Go system!). As an aside, even if you buy an old game new, there is a chance that the publisher wont see any money anyway, if the game store doesn't restock the game. The only advantage to buying new is to stick it to Game Stop (or whoever) and that might be totally worth it anyway. So what makes a sequel sell better than the original? If you had a chance to do something twice, and hear all of the feedback from the original, what might you do? Fixing the problems would be rather high on the list for me. Maybe sequels sell better because they are better games (Castlenvania for the NES, of course, being the exception).

This originally wasn't meant to ride the latest Jimquisition, but I want to talk to one of his points: disrespecting gamers time. Here's what I want you to do: Load this video.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMMcd6-D4x8
(or this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utsvltzxtm4 )

Watch it. It is 13 minutes long. Around ten minutes of names, scrolling. Every single one of those people worked on Deus Ex. Some of them may have worked on this game for years. How many people do you think that was? How many man hours do you think they spent creating this product for you? Take five minutes. Close your eyes. Think of every person you talked to in the last six months. How do you think that list and the list of people in the credits compare. Imagine every one of your relatives who can work. I can come up with maybe thirty. In the first minute of Deus Ex's credits, there are about 40 people mentioned. For many their main source of income is from the game you just played. By buying it used you say that you appreciate what they did, but not enough for them to make some money off of it. And we are wasting their time? (This sentiment goes double for piracy, even though the math isn't quite the same). Buying used is going to restaurant and not leaving a tip. It's being able to afford a night out on the town, but bringing along your shitty kid, because you can't hire a baby sitter. The last thing I wanted to say is on the humanity topic is I hate when people say it is greedy for a business to try to stay in business. They have to pay their employees, they have to maintain a facility, get food, take care of families, and we get to enjoy the fruits of their labors and support them.

To be realistic for a bit, I know some people can't always afford to buy a new game. It is unrealistic to expect everyone to spend money to support the people who made the game, and in many cases it is too late to make a difference anyway. All I'm saying is maybe you can take the time to enter a code to play online. Maybe you can spend money on used game passes to support people who made them. Maybe instead of complaining about how games aren't free, and you can't plug them in and go instantly, you can have fun, you know, enjoy playing the game.


This is a very good place to start having fun (on a budget!)

There's been a pretty big hubub over Metacritic and review scores lately. Many reviews seem 'off' compared to the game, and there are no shortages of people saying so in the comment section. Jim Sterling created two reviews for Final Fantasy 13, one which used his opinions, and the other which was an objective review (and clearly a joke). This showcases a debate: How should a review be conducted? Should a bad game that leaves a good impression get a higher score than a technically perfect masterpiece which played like crap? I will attempt to give an answer below...

The first thing I want to do is provide some background on the human mind. Many of you may be familiar with the Myers Briggs personality test (ESTJ/INFP). This describes how people function by identifying 4 key traits, and is generally more accurate than a Chinese Horoscope (Dragons rule). There are two things about this typing that are important: the first is each letter is not dominant, so someone could be 60% extroverted and 40% introverted, or closer to 90/10. The second thing that this shows is in the third pairing: Thinking or Feeling. In my mind thinking describes the 'math' group and feeling described the 'English' group. Math people tend to like that there is one universal truth as far as an answer goes, and English groups appreciate how a complex question can be argued from multiple angles. I am a math person myself, which is probably why I feel I write so very, very poorly.


CBlogs need pictures. I cant think of a relevant one. So here's a bunny

So that's all well and good, but what does it have to do with review scores? From the perspective of a reader the 'math' type is more likely to scroll down to find out the score, and mentally categorize the game based off that. The 'English' type will read through the whole review, and base their opinion off of what was written instead of going after some bottom line. As mentioned before, this split isn't an on/off kind of split, so math types may read the article, but typically would put more focus on the score and vice versa.

Review scores are written from the 'English' point of view, from what I can tell. A game is graded similarly to how an essay is graded, or more accurately how Art is graded. The reviewer plays a game and is looking for something that cannot be defined by numbers and scales: how much they enjoyed the game. Then they assign a score to the game based off the proverbial taste in their mouth. Do you see the problem? The scores are typically arbitrary, assigned based on whim. So what we get is someone trying to justify to the thinkers why they feel the way they did, which is a difficult task, so both parties will wind up frustrated, and will troll the shit out of the comments (I mean, let's be realistic here).


Mostly unrelated, but Maddox has mastered how to judge objectively. Also decided to stick with the bunny theme

There are two solutions to this problem. The first solution is the remove the scores from the review entirely, but as a math person, I can't endorse that. What I would suggest is a new reviewing system. Each review is given 50 percent to the old style, and 50 percent to my proposed style. What the reviews need is a universal gaming rubric. People could then figure out which side they stand on, or what weighting they would want to apply to the two sides. The way I would imagine the rubric going down is half of it would be dedicated to things that all games contain: gameplay, graphics, sound, etc. The second half would be genre specific, so for an RPG the character progression, battle system, item management. Each genre could also assign a weighting to certain aspects so Arcady style games rely less on graphics, for instance.

The only problem I have encountered with this system is that I am not careful enough to capture every possible metric for each genre, so I do not have an example of the rubric available. However, it is possible to share documents via Google documents, if there was a desire to create a review metric that measured how a game rates without fear for objectivity and bias (mostly). I suggest, but I am too lazy to build, a review rubric that can be used universally. And some people didn't think it was possible to review without feeling....

Before I begin, I remember a lot of cblogs in the past that were mostly inspired by alcohol. I had a lot of fun reading these blogs for two reasons: first to see some of the amusing train wrecks that could happen, but second to get a window into the raw human emotion that can only be brought out in a gamer. If I had a blog to write drunk, this one would have been it, but unfortunately, I wanted to leave this one structured and coherent. There's always tomorrow. Be warned now, this is a rant with probably no actual merit to it. And poorly proofread. Moving on then...

Overrated. tr.v. o·ver·rat·ed, o·ver·rat·ing, o·ver·rates
To overestimate the merits of; rate too highly.
I am kind of disappointed that the dictionary icon didn't change from Harry Potter to Hipster glasses when I looked this word up. Oh well.

With that said, there are so many ways that people in gaming communities have really begun to piss me off. The largest of these offenders is anyone who uses the word overrated to describe something good. If it is popular, it is automatically overrated. Call of Duty? Zelda? Halo? All overrated. Ocarina of Time is one of the best games, advancing a genre into a whole new dimension, graphically and visually. Replaying the game now, it took Link to the Past and advanced each element, including the mostly bare bones plot, and created a world out of Hyrule full of life and characters. But fuck that, Majora's Mask was better, so Ocarina is overrated, because there is another game that is better, but didn't do as well. Does that mean mask should be higher, or Ocarina lower? Either way, piss off.

There are some cases where I could see a game being overrated. A game that is functionally broken, graphically abysmal, or just entirely banal. So for instance, Deadly Premonition would be totally overrated (in the Destructoid community at least). You know what games like this are called? A cult classic. Everyone has an attachment to the game greater than the value of it's parts, and they are willing to forgive the shortcomings because the experience to them is more important. But these games are never classified as overrated, they get a different term instead: shitty. The music medium is experiencing the same thing that the game industry is going through, in my opinion. Hipsters hate on popular music (all of the Gaga's and Beaver's) while they call the other artists that they don't like just plain bad. I will admit the analogy isn't perfect because the stereotyped hipster is looking for a band so indie that it would hurt their ego to like a cult classic, and indie gamers generally don't post on the blogs saying that The Passage is better than Halo because it has worse graphics.



I dont have photoshop, so thanks, internet!

So I don't have good transitions, but bear with me because I want to take you on a journey. You and your friends are all in a cool pool on a warm summer day. Some guy walks by and sees that you are enjoying the pool, but he either 1. doesn't have his trunks or 2. doesn't like to get wet. Most normal people in this situation would pass by, unnoticed. This guy however, drops his pants, and takes a crap in the pool. This is what happens when people post that a game is overrated in the comment section. Now I am not saying that people shouldn't express their opinions, but giving a reason, starting a discussion, adding to the conversation in any way would be fine (except when people are talking about Deadly Premonition because seriously, we all know why its bad. You don't have to remind us.)


Part of the reason why this is such a pain to me is because video games are a recreational activity. Nobody goes into an ice skating rink, rents the skates, skates around for 2 hours, then walks away yelling “I hate ice skating!”. There is so much choice involved with buying and playing a game that no one should ever feel forced into finishing a game they hate, causing them to bitch about it like it killed their parents, while it's ax was on fire. This exact same thing goes for online passes, DLC at 15 dollars, used games with a single save slots, and hats. But someone is probably going to buy it, and if you can't stop them. You saying “15 dollars is too much for a hat” is not going to affect how much someone wants to buy the item. Everyone on the site is old enough to make their own decisions, so basically a comment saying “I don't want to play zombies in COD” comes off to me as “I am soooo jealous of people who can play zombies in COD”. This relates to another thing what that angers me where people have created this mystical idiotic gamer. So many people act because the 'everyday gamer' wouldn't know that Carnival Games and the similar shovelware is crap, that only play Call of Duty, that are blind to online passes, and don't mind DRM. I am fairly certain this person we are striving so hard to protect is fictional, because an average gamer, like an average golfer, and average philatelist actually knows and cares about what they are doing with their time and money.

By the way, this fantasized average gamer is ruining the industry, as is DRM, online passes, motion controls, high definition graphics, exclusives, timed exclusives, DLC, shoverlware, 3d, and digital distribution. The market has now ay of working out which of these will last, because there is no way to attach a monetary figure to how well a game with any of those features does, and if one accidentally does well then its the mystical idiot gamer who propagated it, not everyone who filled out a petition saying they would boycott the game, then bought in day of release.


Its funny because that wouldn't happen. Wait, what?


In closing, I expect each comment to be about how bad it was, how the reader ignored my rant warning and was expecting an editorial, and will offer no ways to improve it.

I started playing through some newer games instead of going through my backlog, and I realized something: Half the games I was playing were sequels. I finished Bioshock 2, which is notable for not being as good as the original. The same can be said for Modern Warfare, Star Wars the Force Unleashed, and Kane and Lynch. Then you look at games like Red Steel, Mass Effect, and Just Cause, and it seems like the sequel can be very swingy. So I figured yet again I could sit down and do some journalism and figure out if there is a method to the madness that is the score for sequels.

I figure that there are two kind of games that get a sequel: The original was widely successful and got milked, or the industry had the money to spend on something that was lukewarm, hoping to build another success. I also figured that there would be a gap between the user and critic score, as even if a game is technically better, gamers are bitter jaded people, and don't care if a game is technically better if the gameplay is stale. So I wanted to show the distribution for the critic and gamer score for the original, and compare that to the sequel. I figured that good games would have bad sequels, and vice versa. All data used would be coming from Metacritic, and the game sampling would be whatever game I could think of that was a direct sequel (so not Halo 3 compared to Halo 2).

So to break down a little stats here, scores for games/movies/books should all be normally distributed, that is to say they should follow a bell shaped curve. Most should be average, and only about 2 percent will be exceptionally great, or exceptionally bad. Below is what this curve looks like for movies that are in theatres right now. This is statistically, pretty awesome. The average score is in the range of 50 to 60, with very few movies coming in at 90-100 and 0-20.



Now to find all of the games and compile their scores in the same manner as the movies is very time consuming, as the formatting is not the same on the website. However, it does list the average score given by a specific publication. And wouldn't you know it, the average game score is around 74 (our own Destructoid rates games at 72, on average). So if you take that above curve, and move it about 30 points to the right, you will get what the game industry looks like. But you cant have a game higher than 100 percent, so move all of those points to the 90-100 range, and you get the below:



Now if you want to get a further understanding of what this means, 2/3 of all games produced are considered to the be the top 20% of games. This starts to explain why I can't figure out how to spend my money on any given selection of games. Now that the score has been contextualized, see the below graph for games that got a sequel, by score:




These show the distribution for games that got a sequel. What does this tell you? For the most part, you have to do a pretty good job in order to get a sequel. Now an interesting angle from this is the gamer vs critic score comes in at about ten points lower. This could be a case of 'the sequel was better' or cross platform fanboyism reducing scores. Either way, the evidence is clear that usually bad games do not receive sequels. This is where things start to get interesting:



According to this second graph, critics are a little less fond of the sequel than the original game. Their graph is still pretty skewed towards higher numbers. Basically when a great game gets a sequel, it loses about ten points or so, critically. However, the gamer score tells a different story altogether. The score for all games should be normal. Taking the sample of games that got sequels skewed that curve so that the score was shifted about ten points positively. However the score for sequels, is back to being normal, with the score right back at the average. There is yet another image that is not shown in anything above, which is the change from the original to the sequel, as shown below:



To the critics, the game doesn't change too much. More was gained by the sequel than was lost from a critical standpoint. This makes sense, as the designers got to hear the complains about the original and fix the systems. This graph is very well concentrated around the center. Gamers however, seemed a little more polarized, and a few sequels took a fairly large plummet. I will admit that I manipulated some data for this, because in the case of Assassin's Creed intrusive DRM made the PC score lose around 50 points. This was not uncommon, so I tried to pick random platforms, and see if the cause was something I felt that was related to the game or outside influences. I don't really have some kind of underlying message that I was trying to spread by writing this. As with most things that I like to share, I just like to share because I think it was neat.

So recently there have been quite a few articles circulating around the interwebs about why sex in video games looks unrealistic, or games being viewed as art or similar to movies, relating specifically to how it just isn't there. I don't think that will ever happen, just by the nature of how video games are. They are different from other mediums, and should be embraced as such. (This blog contains spoilers for The Darkness, NieR, some talk of Deadly Premonition, and a picture of Miranda's Ass. Large spoilers marked.)

I was thinking about why sex scenes in video games don't have the same impact as a sex scene in a movie, or doing the horizontal monster mash in real life, even. Starting off easy, in Fable you get to pick an arbitrary woman, and your flirting is comprised mostly of trying to impress her with your farts/belches/jokes/dances. Then after you marry her, you get to see the other 714 different characters in the same town that look exactly like her, and it makes it rather pointless to have selected her as the shining example of fidelity and womanhood. Her seven dialog lines are rehashed over and over again as you go through the motions to get to a quality knobbing, and maybe even an achievement pop.

When you play Mass Effect you are running around the galaxy with your harem of space babes. All of you are quipping one liners as you take out robot hordes, shoot down giant insects, or just kill bounty hunters. I am so horny right now! But seriously the entire game is spent in the heat of battle, with mild emphasis on dicking around on the ship. I think this starts to explain why I only liked the secretary on the ship. Don't get me wrong, there was video sex appeal with some of the other characters, but she was the only person who I got a chance to talk to about crap that wasn't story related. I mean, if I spent all day with crazy hot chicks, but all we did was work, talk about work, then debrief after work, I would want to date anyone else in the world (I work in insurance). I want to go out for a beer with them, invite them to a movie, stick my hand down their....you know, get to know them before I show them the wedding tackle.



Image searching 'Miranda that ass' is safe for work!...for about 3 pictures.

So then the question is left hanging there: what makes a connection to a character relatable, and more importantly, bangable? My answer is the little things in life. A relationship isn't formed by the defining moments in your life, it is defined by the day to day between two people. It isn't a sprint to see who gets to love first, but a marathon to see who hates last. So what games had this right? The first game is the Darkness

SPOILER ALERT

In the Darkness you play as a ruthless mob member, suddenly imbued with god like powers. You tear through gang member after gang member, without a hint of remorse. It is your day job. Then you meet up with Jenny. And you know what happens? She made you a cake. It's your birthday. Lets watch some TV. Cuddle on the couch. No mobsters. No demons. Just you, a girl, a couch, and the TV. I will admit, the first time I played, I stayed with her for the achievement associated with wasting the time. The character's thoughts mirrored my own: “This is kind of lame sitting here, but there is probably a reward at the end of it. This TV program is stupid. Not even going to eat the cake. I have no less than 100 people to kill, including Pauly. I suppose I should get on that, but there is a girl resting on me. Ah well.” That moment made the connection to me. Just sitting there, enjoying her virtual company, combined with her innocence, made her death all the more poignant.

END SPOILER


This is one of the most defining moments of my gaming life

So many games use the Super Meat Boy approach of: this is you girlfriend, you love her because she is your girlfriend, do you love her, k, shes dead now ooohhhh noooooooo. Games have the opportunity to take the time to build the relationships. You can play for 80 hours, and even if you spend one of those developing a single relationship it is more time than any movie can.

The second example is a part of the game called Deadly Premonition. Did I say a part? I meant the whole thing. The entire game was a series of small encounters. Name your favorite scene from that game. Was it York eating lunch with Emily, when Mr. Steward shows up? Was it when York first showed up and talked to Polly at the inn? Or how about when you are driving, and talking about movies? The entire game is centered around interactions between characters. None of the memorable moments are the same as Call of Duty where it is some action centric nuke fest. From my perspective, when I have left a girl I don't think about her in some epic moment that defined our relationship. It was that song that played in the park, or the time when the waiter talked about some internet meme. The gameplay in Deadly Premonition is terrible, the graphics decidedly last gen, but the story it tells is superb. This is what makes everyone, but specifically Thomas' and Emily's stories that much more interesting to follow through the game. (Come to think of it, Grand Theft Auto 4 did a lot of this as well, just going on dates and shooting the breeze, which made all of the characters conclusions a lot more meaningful. I was legitimately mad at the end of both games, possibly from that connection.)



So why don't games focus on the small details like that? Games are first meant to be interactive. The player always wants a chance to pick up the controller and play along. Vanquish spent about twenty minutes setting up “yo, you see those robots, shoot em”. The first time I played, I skip the intro. It wasn't important, I just wanted to shoot. If a game doesn't offer some control to the player, then why are we even playing a game instead of reading a book or a movie? So to create an experience where the player is having small interactions, yet keeping involved is difficult at best. PRESS LB TO CUDDLE. Just not quite the same. The small interactions while meaningful are often hard to convey as button presses. Having never played Heavy Indigo Prophesy Rain I can't say how well these actions are integrated, but from what I hear...poor.

Reason number two why games are bad at conveying this: games are meant to be fun. All games are action centric, and spending the time to build character and develop feelings isn't 'fun'. Press X to talk to have your character reflect on his emotions. QTE to tell a joke. This could (and usually does) go on for long amounts of time. One of the most interesting experiences I had was playing the game NieR (play it!). I made it to the village of Facade, a village devoted to rules. A local explains the first three or so without letting you opt out. At first I was speeding through text, and then I thought: “If I were reading a book right now, I would be loving this, but I just want to kill stuff”. As soon as I realized that, I took my time with the game. I listened to every rule that she mentioned, and laughed at some of the more eccentric ones. Enjoyed the little bits. This did absolutely nothing for me later on. There was no password to get through a door later, no clue to how to get a more powerful weapon. It was just part of the lore of the game. (SPOILER: Later on when the town gets attacked, I was moved. When the king helps you in the last dungeon of the game...sacrificing everything he has to buy you time to help your daughter, after all he had been through. The whole scene is one of the top ten for me in that game. And that's saying something. END SPOILER) I think for most people though, the pointless exposition would only serve as a hindrance to the action.



This leads into the fact that games are meant to be action centric. Look at every Lord of the Rings game. Frodo walks for twelve hours, talking to Sam. Then, they stay at an inn. Then they walk and talk for twelve hours. The elves give them some bread. The king is slowly being corrupted by an agent of Sauron. In the meantime, holy crap, Gandalf is fighting a Balrog, throw that in the game. Town under siege, giant epic battle, all good. Oh, Frodo is leaving the Shire? Sum that up in an epilogue, lets goooooo. If a game doesn't focus on the action, the point of having it as a game is gone.


Imagine....forty hours of walking. Walking with you hetero life partner

The last thing that separates a game has to have difficulty built in. Difficulty implies failure. Failure implies restarting from a checkpoint, and ruining any mood that might have been. Action is easy to interrupt for a 'try again' screen, but romance is a little bit harder to pick back up, mostly because to me it comes off as a spur of the moment thing. Its a passing remark, a half nervous, half witty comment, meant to impress once just to get someones attention. To watch that same awkward, forced comment again and again because I didn't deliver it with the right emphasis? That would kill any connection I made.

I just don't think that video games will ever be the medium for meaningful or sexual encounters as long as these things hold true. And I don't think this is a problem with gamers, but the whole system. We play games to have fun, and action is what is the main cause of fun. To take time to build character is to take time away from the action and fun, and why we play the game. I am curious to see how Catherine turns out, stateside. The game seems to put action and storytelling side by side. I also haven't played 999 yet, but I have heard good things about it's storytelling. Perhaps there needs to be a new genre of game built towards storytelling so that no standards are set for the genre. Until then, it just wont work.